This Is Not Your Mother's CBC

Says the latest full-page ad touting the launch of the Mothercorp's Winter Prime-Time Schedule, and they are not kidding. I guess the bad news is CBC 2.0 won't be bringing us anything along the lines of SCTV, The Kids In The Hall or Donald Brittain-calibre documentaries, then.

CBC has recently seemed to me to be about three or four years behind most TV trends. Their biggest ratings hit of late, Little Mosque on the Prairie, bears more than a passing resemblance to Corner Gas, a successful CBC-esque show airing on the private broadcaster for three or four years now.

This season, CBC has:

- their own 24 (The Border, with lots of Kiefer-meets-David Caruso squinting through Raybans, jittery shots of computer monitors, gunmetal grey interrogation rooms, dialogue revolving around the phrases "intel" and "satellite uplink" and gunfights in parking lots with shutter-strobe photography.)

- their own Footballers' Wives (MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives): bare bums in the locker room and flashes of boobies after 9 PM! Here's a telling quote from one of the actresses on the show (italics mine): “I remember my jaw dropping when the script for the pilot had a sex scene that involved double-teaming. It never shows that happening, but I remember going, ‘What? For the CBC, a threesome is pretty risqué!'”

- a Reality Bites-esque Gen-Y comedy called J-Pod billed wincingly as "a full terabyte of dysfunctional" but which at least has Alan Thicke as a sleazy dad. That still won't be enough, though.

- their own wacky one-woman Sex In The City called Sophie (itself a remake of a Quebec sitcom) which seems to have incorporated every Cosmo cliché imaginable without irony: the gay best friend, the domineering mother, etc. The tagline for the show is "And the craziness hasn't even begun!", which I imagine they can use for the entire run of the series.

Well, at least it's writers strike reruns in the States and that will allow these shows a rare chance to be seen. And whether or not it all works out, I guess this means maybe in 2010 the CBC will have an ersatz Desperate Housewives or Entourage to push, perhaps while mocking the kind of shows they are running now.

Hey, and what's wrong with the old CBC anyway? It was awesome! I think the braintrust ignores this at their peril.

Brinksmanship

The big news in Toronto yesterday was the startling announcement from City Hall that, as a result of a tax vote in City Council being put off until after the Provincial Elections in the fall, severe budget cuts would have to be made immediately. The first announcement was that the Toronto Transit Commission would scale operations back drastically, revealing plans for the imminent cancellation of 29 bus routes (mostly ones that are primarily used by senior citizens as far as the downtown routes go - the Avenue Road bus, the Davenport bus) and most notably, the mothballing of the only six-year-old Sheppard Subway, which is apparently used by only 45 people a day. The talk is to close it down in January.

This is exciting news for future Toronto urban explorers - wait till the suburban indie rock kids of 2065 discover there is a secret subway system leading halfway to the Scarborough Town Centre (by that point a maximum security prison) - they will probably bust in through a set of double doors nearby Bessarion Station and run up and down the cobwebbed platforms and darkened tunnels.

If the TTC is really that hell-bent to save money, they should consider pulling the plug on the unnecessary remodeling of several of the stations on the University Line. Nothing wrong with the beige-tiled sixties public washroom vibe of Museum Station as it stands now, but they have already begun the work to bring the platform design into the nineties: Next on the renovations block is this headache inducer - St. Patrick Station, soon to be renamed Art Gallery!
It's almost as if they're trying to get people to not use the University Line either...

You Can Fight City Hall

They're fucking with Nathan Phillips Square. The bids are in on the further T-Dotification of Toronto, updating our Modernist, Brasilia-esque city square into a more "revitalized" (their jargon) rethink. All the designs call for the removal of the amazing elevated walkway that circles the square and hooks up to the Sheraton Centre across the street - very classy, but it's been locked off from the public for years.

City Hall has shown up in the strangest places in pop culture. Playing itself in the William Shatner Canuxploitation thriller The Kidnapping Of The President. An episode of Star Trek. Pursuit of Happiness videos. That crap Kiefer Douglas thriller The Sentinel last year.

Well, they're "revitalizing" it now. Whatever design wins, it won't be as cool as this one!

This is the kind of movie that makes you wish we still had grindhouses like the Coronet or the Rio, or crumbling seventies multiplexes like the last incarnation of the Eaton Centre Cineplex. I used to go to there on two dollar Tuesdays without knowing what was playing. I'd just pick something tawdry off the marquee like it was off the menu. This is how I got in on the ground floor with the whole Steven Seagal thing.

Happy Black History Month!

Eddie Murphy's latest crime against humanity, Norbit, opened this weekend and made 34 million dollars!

Eddie is the front runner to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor at the end of the month for his performance as Little Jackie Cooke Brown Gaye in the musical Dreamgirls but apparently an anti-Murphy backlash is coalescing among Academy voters, as many in Hollywood feel either Murphy hasn't done enough drama or simply cannot be rewarded with an Oscar considering his career is made up (especially in the last ten years) with lowbrow freakshows like The Nutty Professor, Daddy Daycare and The Adventures of Pluto Nash. This movement points to the billboards for Norbit as their best argument against giving Murphy the gold - and I think it will work. Or I did think so, before I read about Norbit making 34 million dollars. Now all bets are off.

If It Ain't Broke, Break It

The mind boggles...


The Paramount, the former flagship theatre of the Famous Players chain in Toronto, underwent a name change overnight this week, caught in the crossfire of synergy between the place's new owner, the Cineplex chain, and the Bank of Nova Scotia. Now when I make plans to go to a movie I'll have to say something like this: "Hey, let's go see Ghost Rider tonight - I'll meet you outside the Scotiabank at 9 o'clock."

Famous Players was part-owned by Viacom at the time the place opened (it was called 'Festival Hall' while it was being built, in a brazen attempt to court TIFF as it's future home, which didn't quite work out the way it was planned...) so it made semi-sense to name the place the Paramount, which at least is a historical movie theatre name in the United States. Renaming it the Scotiabank to me seems shameless and boring, though I'm sure the Cineplex/Scotiabank marketing departments could talk my ears off with why it's the perfect name for a movie theatre. Here's an attempt, from the story in the Toronto Star:

"We're rewarding customers for doing what they already do: go to movies and do their banking," said Scotiabank spokesperson John Doig.

The whole enterprise revolves around the idea that audiences would go to the movies to participate in a rewards program. I guess if you go to first-run movies a lot, it may now also be easier to secure a loan to support your habit.

To make matters worse, unlike the artists' rendition of the new facade seen above, here's what it looks like in real life - it might be temporary, but I have a feeling (a prayer, really) the whole idea is temporary...

But they shouldn't stop the rethinking there - maybe they can address the damn Klingon ship they have dangling over the dizzying escalators. Or maybe they can do something about what I call the epileptic's entrance (a nondescript, non-warp-speed elevator hiding to the left of the box office area). Speed that puppy up!

And get rid of the giant Rubik's Cube! And make it easier to find the concession stand! I got points to cash in!

Cinq Coins

It's strange that Tony Bill's Five Corners has vanished into obscurity. It was a major Christmas release in 1987 for the arthouse scene, with a cast of young actors on the cusp of major fame; Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins and John Turturro. It wasn't a hit, but it had a lot of name recognition at the time, not least because it was written by John Patrick Shanley, who would win the Oscar for the other film he wrote that year, Moonstruck. He seemed like a major new screenwriter at the time.

Five Corners was tough to market: here's a one sentence summary of the film I just found on the internet machine:

A rapist gets out of jail and returns to his old neighborhood in the Bronx, setting off a series of events that bring together his victim, her boyfriend, a pacifist, two wise-cracking cops, an algebra teacher killed by an arrow and other assorted eccentrics.

So yes, escalating weirdness, and yet grounded firmly in impeccable production design that recalls photos from Look and Life magazines of the period (1964, the Bronx). It made for a very memorable film... actually I'm almost afraid to see it again in case it's not as good as I recall...

But there's no point in grabbing it in its present condition. Cannon put it out on home video in the nineties but they must have lost the rights along the road to ruin, for in the last days of the VHS era and into the DVD era, myriad public domain releases of Five Corners started popping up in discount movie bins at Wal-Mart, etc, most likely all mastered from a ninth-generation VHS dub. Not even the cast was enough for a major player to grab that one when the rights came into the market? I'm sure you can buy a fine quality version in France...

Brutally Comic, Brutally Tragic: Kings & Queen and the End of the Reps

Toronto is about to undergo a cultural lobotomy at the end of the week. Four of the five theatres in the Festival Cinemas repertory theatre chain will close this Friday (June 30th), including the Revue, which has been open since the 1910s, and the Royal, an art-deco-tinged jewel, where I once had the privilege to show my feature-length tribute to late night commercials, Infomercial Night. These theatres were home to more than just second-run movies - they were used by smaller film festivals and such beloved institutions as my friend Colin's Kung Fu Fridays screening series. It just got a little harder for a cineaste to labour for love in this town.

I know it's partly my fault that these places where I spent years of my life getting my film-going education are closing shop - I don't go very often anymore. DVDs have kind of ruined going to the movies for me. And the window between a film's theatrical release and its DVD debut is down to about four months in most cases, so people tend to go rent the disc when it comes out instead of seeing them second-run. I remember a couple of years ago when the two Kill Bill films finally played as a double-bill, at the Royal - I had assumed there were lots of film nerds like me who had held off seeing them, waiting for the opportunity to see them both together in the theatre, in one evening, so I arrived early expecting a line-up around the block...there were about 50 people there in total. I should have known then that the end of the reps was near, and now here it is.

The same night the reps are mostly closing, Cinematheque Ontario will be showing one of the bona fide masterpieces of this era, Arnaud Desplechin's Rois et Reine (Kings & Queen) from 2004, which once upon a time would have been an art-house staple, but in this day and age went straight to video except for the major US markets. Not even an unexpected placing right behind A History of Violence in the Village Voice's 2005 critics poll stirred up much interest in it - it played at TIFF in 2004 but is only now popping into a theatre in Toronto for a couple of nights. Better than nothing, I guess.

Desplechin made a film in the mid nineties called Comment Je Me Suis Dispute...(ma vie sexuelle) which was a three hour film about a young French intellectual's chaotic love life and stalled academic career which I loved loved loved to pieces. I took an aisle seat when I went to see it at the festival in 1996 in case I couldn't take it and had to bolt but quite the contrary - it was one of the few movies I've seen that I didn't want to end. And I thought it was just me who felt this way, because of the few people I know who did see it, most bolted. Desplechin's newest film didn't knock me off my feet to the same extent, but it haunted me ever since and seeing it again once it eventually showed up on video sealed the deal.

When Desplechin was putting the film together, he pinned to the wall a maxim of filmmaking that motivated Francois Truffaut - "One minute: four ideas". Desplechin's films are jammed full of detail and ideas and life - tons of tiny yet fleshed-out roles for actors, allusions to art, literature, psychoanalysis, myth, and different film genres and music - Kings & Queen's soundtrack ranges from classical to klezmer to hip-hop to Randy Newman and Henry Mancini - almost too much detail for an audience to take in on first viewing. Kings & Queen is basically two movies in one - a tragic storyline that evokes the "women's pictures" of the forties and fifties, steeped in melodrama and dilemma, and a burlesque, slapstick storyline involving a musician's descent into madness, that are somehow, in Desplechin's hands, made to co-exist. Emmanuelle Devos plays the woman, and one of my favourite actors of today, Mathieu Amalric (he was the lead in Comment Je Me Suis Dispute... and the dandyish French informant in Munich), plays the man. There are emotional moments in this film that I recognize from life but didn't think could be captured in movies. There are two monologues of unadulterated candour late in the picture, one shocking in its cruelty, the other stunning in its generosity, which floored me.

If you're in town, see it now, because it's not going to the reps.

UPDATE: Not only is Kings & Queen getting a first-run release in Toronto after all (it opens at the Carlton July 7th), but also it seems the Royal Cinema will survive in some way, shape or form...it's being turned into a post-production facility by day and movie theatre by night...it will be closed for renovations this summer, though. (June 29th - JH)